Archive | April, 2010

Plants in Print

29 Apr

Am so enjoying the work of botanical printmaker Angie Lewin, whose output seems to be popping up everywhere right now – in galleries like Bankside,  as well as places like Petersham Nurseries and the Garden Museum, where it appears on delightful greeting cards.

Angie lives in Norfolk and says her work is “inspired by both the clifftops and saltmarshes of the North Norfolk coast and the Scottish Highlands”.

“Still lives often incorporate seedpods, grasses, flints and dried seaweed collected on walking and sketching trips,” she says.

Sounds lovely, doesn’t it?  BBC Homes and Antiques recently dubbed her work part of the  ‘the new botanics’. Quite right. It’s so refreshing to see things like teasels and poppy seedheads portrayed in a contemporary way, when garden art so often falls into the staid.

You can see Angie’s work here and on her blog, here.

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Keep off the Grass

28 Apr

The lengths I go to, dear reader, to keep you in pretty pictures are nothing short of extraordinary. See this picture? See the those tulips? Nearly cost me 400 pounds.

I suppose I asked for it. There I was, merrily snapping away in one of the city parks yesterday evening, when a thick-set man came and stood solidly behind me.  He coughed.

‘You’re on the grass,’ he said.

‘Am I?’ I asked, looking up and then around me. ‘Oh dear, I’d better get off then.’

I’ll admit I feigned ignorance about not being allowed on the grass because in actual fact I was standing right next to a sign instructing one to remove one’s person from said lawn, and you would have to be blind not to see it.  Not even pretending to be Afrikaans-speaking would have worked because a) my Afrikaans is dreadful and b) Keep off the Grass looks the same in almost every language that cares about these things, and Afrikaans, you have to admit, has in the past been pretty good at telling people where they can and cannot stand.

Nope, I’d just chosen to ignore the sign, which isn’t fair or proper considering council gardeners work awfully hard at patching up gardens after dozens of people like me have traipsed through them. So perhaps what came next was karmic justice.

I’d snapped and snapped, even lain on a tarmac path with my head just on the lawn to take a picture of some forget-me-nots, when another thick-set man alerted me to the approaching closing time.

As I folded up my tripod and packed away my camera, he looked at me for a bit, took a breath and said, ‘Do you have a permit for this?’

Oh, the power these men wield. Of course I didn’t have a permit. A permit to take pictures of flowers in a park through which all and sundry pass every minute of every working day?

‘No,’ I said, looking at my shoes, which was about the point to which my heart had sunk.

‘There’s a fine of 400 pounds for that, you know, taking pictures without a permit. It’s more with a tripod. And are you a professional?’

‘No,’ I half lied, suddenly awfully glad I don’t have ads on this blog and that I earn more money off writing than photographs.

‘Oh. It’s more if you’re a professional.’

Sighing, and swallowing a small, anxious lump that had rather inconveniently materialised in my throat, I explained that if he charged me 400 pounds for something that wasn’t pointed out on the entrance board, I probably wouldn’t be able to pay him because there just isn’t a spare 400 pounds floating around right now.

Suddenly he changed his tune.

‘Mmmm.  See that building? That lot are always taking pictures in this garden. Books, you know.  And our parks and grounds people might need some pictures.

‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘Come back on Friday afternoon and ask for me. I can’t promise anything but come and put your ‘ead in.’

Later, when I huffed and puffed about nanny states and curious groundsmen to my fella, I found no sympathy. Instead, he laughed like a drain.

‘Seriously? Come back on Friday after he’s just let you off a big  fine? That’s the best pick-up line I’ve ever heard.’

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Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice

26 Apr

When you have spent almost an entire sunny weekend day indoors, there is nothing like popping outside and being confronted by a sea of hobbling marathon runners to make you feel like a total slug – especially if the only constructive thing you have done all Sunday is make Lemon Drizzle Cake.

Lemon Drizzle Cake? Well, it began with a homemade recipe book I bought last week at the Open Garden I mentioned in my previous post. I love homemade recipe books, especially when they are called things like Other People’s Cakes, as this one is.  That said, I must admit that the recipes in this one do  sound a little suggestive – Granny Meg’s Fruit Cake with Ginger, for instance, or Nellie’s Gateau au Chocolat.  I’ll stop before I blush.

What got me onto making cakes this weekend was a miserable packet of malted biscuits I’d bought, earlier in the week, in the hope that they’d fill a little tea time gap. My, was I disappointed: they tasted of precisely nothing, the reason for which became abundantly clear as soon as I read the ingredients list (which I ought to have done in the first place).  It was palm oil and corn syrup, rather than butter and sugar, that were sinking their way to my hips.  What a shameful waste of calories.

This does, however, bring me to two blogs I’ve wanted to tell you about for some time.  The first is Wandering Gaia, belonging to science and nature writer Gaia Vince,who has the kind of career I’d love were I more intrepid and better at figures. Previously an editor at Nature and then New Scientist, she’s travelling the world looking at how climate change is affecting those most vulnerable to it.  She’s already visited  Indonesia, where natural forest is being cleared  to accommodate our palm oil habit.

The second is from über blogger and ladies’ man James Alexander Sinclair, usually of Blogging from Blackpitts, who has begun (ok, a while ago now) with some mates a blog all about biscuits.  Unsurprisingly, it’s called Encounters with Remarkable Biscuits.  I’d recommend a nice cup of tea and a happy hour dipping into it.

The picture is of some blossom, which I’m beginning to think is all rather too ephemeral for my good mental health. You spend months anticipating the stuff, it arrives and, before you know it, it’s over, gathering in papery drifts on the pavement.  That sounds like a lot of things, actually – a slice of Lemon Drizzle Cake being one.  I’d post a picture, only it’s all gone.

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Thank God for Spring Sunshine and Magnolias

18 Apr

Walking along Half Moon Lane in Herne Hill this afternoon to see an Open Garden (beautiful; full of hellebores, forget-me-nots, wallflowers and daffodils),  I recognised the sense of relief and well-being I felt last year, when I took these photos of some magnolias in Kew Gardens.  See?  So pleased was I to be in some sunshine after what I thought was a long,  dreary winter that  I pointed my camera directly at the sun to make sure it was real.

The date on these pics is March 15, which marks this spring out to be nearly a month later than last year, although, to be fair, some magnolias have already been out for a week or two. Having grown up with almost perpetual warmth and sunshine, this winter has felt like an eternity.

But before I get het up on dates and figures and what we think plants and sunshine ought to be doing at certain times of year, read this lovely piece from A Single Swallow, by Horatio Clare:

Like birds, we take our cues from seasons, from the phases of the moon and the movements of the sun. But we have formalised our calculations into a rigid but invisible web of grids, of time and space, which theoretically tell us when and where we are. The problem is that though there are many repeating mathematical patterns in nature and cosmology, the rhythms of the earth fluctuate outside the calculations we have designed to contain it…We talk of early springs and late summers as though the seasons were somehow out of joint, while it would perhaps be more logical to consider that it is our neat calendar of  hours, days and weeks, with their chain of ‘seasonal’ festivals that is inaccurate.

(I’ve just spent about twenty minutes trying to find that piece which I read last night at about 1am, noted and then neglected to mark on the page. It’s on page 280, if you’re interested.)

He has a point, hasn’t he? Clare refers chiefly to swallows and their migration, which he follows through Africa from Cape Town to rural Wales, but I think it has bearing on plants, too.

Still, it doesn’t diminish my pleasure at having just cause to walk bare legged, wear sunglasses and drink ginger beer in the middle of the afternoon once more.

PS  Being close to the flight path to Heathrow, I’m so enjoying the peace and quiet of not having the drone of aeroplane engines overhead at all times of day and night.  That said, besides those travellers who really do have places to be, I can’t help feeling for fruit, cut-flower and vegetable farmers whose livelihoods are held ransom by a volcano on the other side of the world – and by what some would say is an untenable economic system, the vulnerability of which is now laid bare. The Guardian has an interesting piece on the subject here

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